Christine Wandel told me Steve Kupka of Tower of Power was she and Keith Purvis’s roommate on Grove Street in Oakland. Steve helped put together Huey Lewis and the News, and was friends with The Loading Zone who played at the Northern California Folk-Rock Festival. Christine, Keith, Tim O-Connor, and myself lived in a ten bedroom Victorian in downtown Oakland in 1967-68 with the Loading Zone. Most of our roommates are in this photo.

Christine was backstage with Janis Joplin and picked up a brass bell that fell off a neckless she was wearing. Some accounts have Big Brother and the Zone playing together at these concerts that preceded Woodstock and Altamont.

Peter Shapiro and Tim still perform music. O’Connor’s ‘The Hippies Were Right’ is the anthem for this series of concerts that set out to prove just that. The Hell’s Angels should have been sidelined, left out of the…